Don't bite the Oligarch who feeds you? — a cynical comment about the American future

© 2018 Peter Free

 

02 August 2018

 

 

Cynicism is a useful aid — to penetrating propaganda

 

Regarding the anticipated dismemberment of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, I have been a bit surprised how easily Lamestream media have given up their historically proclaimed right to explore rats' nests.

 

Thus, Assange looks as if he will swing by the neck on his own, having become an easy victim of the oligarchic establishment that runs our Military Industrial Complex.

 

In this regard, contrarian journalist Caitlin Johnstone observed that:

 

 

Theoretically, journalism is meant to help create an informed populace and hold power to account.

 

The press today is failing to protect Julian Assange because it has no intention of creating an informed populace or holding power to account.

 

Mainstream media outlets and those who thrive within them have no intention of rocking the boat and losing their hard-earned privilege and access. Conservative mass media will continue to defend the US president, and liberal media will continue to defend the CIA and the FBI.

 

Both will help advance war, ecocide, military expansionism, surveillance and police militarization, and none will leak anything that is damaging to the power structures that they have learned to serve.

 

They will remain innocuous, uncontroversial defenders of the rich and powerful at all times.

 

Every day that goes by where they don’t unequivocally condemn any attempt to prosecute Assange is another day in the pile of evidence that corporate media outlets serve power and not truth.

 

Their silence is a tacit admission that they are nothing other than stenographers and propagandists for the most powerful forces on earth.

 

© 2018 Caitlin Johnstone, In Refusing To Defend Assange, Mainstream Media Exposes Its True Nature, Greanville Post (30 July 2018) (excerpts)

 

 

Notice three things

 

First, economics dictates the democracy-defeating outcome that Johnstone observes. By making the population entirely dependent upon a division of wealth that exclusively favors holders of capital — we enslave our working selves.

 

Second, American political institutions are helpless to reverse this Founders' choice. The Constitution was overtly designed to favor wealth-holders against the Rabble. As a result, Plutocracy has now fully bought the Republic.

 

Third, given that Establishment propaganda (via the Lamesteam) is so effective, there is not a substantially noticeable trace of resistance coming from our Grand Herd. This state of affairs defeats the reasoning of those who hold that mass demonstrations will, or should, unseat what has happened. There is not much (realistically speaking) that one could do with institutionally suppressed sheep, except feed them to wolves.

 

 

The moral? — If change comes, it will be via . . .

 

. . . the machinations of another group of (probably equally violent and self-serving) elitists. Who will also be manipulating millions upon millions of suitably Fodder Animals — meaning you and me.

 

Am I too cynical?

 

Show me a probabilistically sounder analysis, if you can.

 

I have seen nothing in History to indicate that hundreds of millions of people can maintain a democracy. All the reasonably successful ones still in existence are dramatically smaller (than ours) and heretofore, at least, arguably more homogeneous in political and cultural outlook. I also hypothesize that most of them are noticeably better informed and more dedicated to community wellbeing.

 

In short, if we are going to aim at creating fairness-prone change in the United States, we better have a realistic sense regarding the dynamics of our current condition.